Thursday, February 25, 2010

Bit of a Facebook Plug

6 February 2010After breakfast, we began our morning at the Kakum Forest Reserve. There, we did a canopy walk. At its highest point, we were 160 metres up among the trees. Yes, metres. I was born to speak British. The idea was to see wildlife, but we only saw a couple monkeys briefly. Nevertheless, it was nifty walking that high up in the air on a spiff little bridge. There are pictures of this and the rest of the trip on Facebook, check it out! We took the van to the Cape Coast Town and were let loose to explore for a few hours. We were rather hungry so we all started off with some lunch. From my seat at the table, I had the restaurant straight ahead, the town to my left, the beach to my right, and another slave castle behind me. Quite the set of views. A man in the restaurant was playing Bob Marley songs and he when he came to Redemption Song I got chills.After lunch, we went to the castle that had been our dining scenery. The castle was roughly the same as the other, but the tour was much better. After the tour, we went out into the heart of the city where we wandered onto less traveled roads full of children playing, many of whom probably rarely see oburonis. They walked around with us and were excited for us to take pictures of them making crazy faces so they could run back over and see the results. The best one I got featured a girl holding a chicken over another girl’s head. Again, it’s on Facebook, check it out. Along the sides of the road, we saw many people playing a game that looked like checkers. My friend John was interested, so he asked a couple of men how to play. They eagerly brought him and the rest of us over to sit and had John take a shot at the game. It starts off the same as regular checkers, but you can go backwards and the kings do something weird. The most important difference though, is that you can’t simply place your piece where you want it to go. Through the Ghanaians’ example, we learned that you must slam the piece down on the board. It’s way more interesting that way and a good way to wake your opponent up if you’ve taken too long on your turn.